Organised by EXC 2020, project Circulations of Theory: Topics, Processes, and Histories of a Globalised Form of Writing, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies", the Project Group for Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education), and the Visual Culture Research Center, Ukraine.

Violence is being traditionally inscribed in the historical context of the 20th century with its totalitarianisms, genocides, and mass terror and is clearly defined in negative terms. Hence the idea of non-violent development and the achievement of a state of society in which manifestations and methods of violence would morph into increasingly civilised forms, which seemed to have become generally accepted in the last few decades being particularly inspired by a range of the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 that were dubbed 'non-violent.' This approach, which seeks to reduce or avoid violence in society, to make it controllable and transparent, has utterly failed in the last years. In the context of brutal full-scale wars and genocidal attempts in Eastern Europe, violence in its most savage and archaic forms once again merged with the very fabric of society, penetrating all spheres of life and leading to the degradation of social cohesion and solidarity.

Against the backdrop of raging wars and a fascist turn in global politics, the event tackles the multifaceted realities of violence and its societal impacts by addressing the extreme violent ideologies and their political applications, war traumata and the mass psychophysical devastation, the destruction of nature particularly due to military hostilities, the current visual violence and the variety of forms of its representation in arts and media.

Programme

Keynote: Michał Herer (University of Warsaw)

Discussion with Michał Herer and Vasyl Cherepanyn (Visual Culture Research Center, Ukraine/EXC 2020 Early Career Fellow April–May 2025)

A Discussion with Stanislav Aseyev (writer and journalist) und Yana Kononova (visual artist)

Moderated by Kateryna Mishchenko (writer and publisher)

A Discussion with Lesia Kulchynska (independent curator and visual studies researcher), Mykola Ridnyi (artist, filmmaker and curator) and Till Gathmann (typographer, artist and writer/former EXC 2020 Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence, November–December 2022)

Moderated by Susanne Strätling (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020)